Wonolo Raises $32 Million To Help Facilitate Seasonal Staffing Needs

By Amit Chowdhry ● Updated November 11, 2018

San Francisco-based Wonolo is an on-demand staffing platform that has announced it has raised $32 million in Series C funding led by Bain Venture Capital with participation from DAG Ventures and support from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Base10, AMN Healthcare, and Cendana.

Wonolo is an on-demand staffing platform that enables businesses to fill their immediate labor needs. With this new round of funding, Wonolo plans to expand its team and accelerate growth to meet the high level of demand for temporary staffing solutions.

How does it work? Wonolo’s platform connects underemployed hourly workers with understaffed employers across retail, manufacturing, and logistics organizations.

“When we founded Wonolo in 2014, we had a two-part goal of solving the underemployment epidemic for Americans while simultaneously eliminating the temporary staffing shortage large brands face,” said Wonolo co-founder and CEO Yong Kim in a statement. “Over the past four years, we have scaled our business model and built a thriving marketplace that connects hundreds of thousands of underemployed workers with the jobs they need. Jamison Hill and Bain Capital Ventures are providing us with the opportunity to put Wonolo’s technology into the hands of major Fortune 500 companies to help upend traditional staffing models.”

Previous investors Base10, Sequoia, PivotNorth, and Tuesday Capital also joined this round. Wonolo has now raised a total of $60 million in funding. In conjunction with this funding round, Bain Venture Capital principal Jamison Hill is joining Wonolo’s board of directors.

“Wonolo is reinventing the way people find hourly work. Their technology platform creates more flexibility for underemployed workers and fills hiring needs for understaffed companies insanely fast and at a disruptively lower cost,” added Hill. “We are excited to support the Wonolo team in pursuing their grand mission of bringing flexible and fulfilling work to everyone.”

According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report from June 2018, the number of open positions in the US this year exceeded the number of job seekers for the first time on record. And about 5 million Americans are also underemployed, which means that they are looking for full-time work but receive fewer than 30 hours per week from employers. So employers are scrambling to meet their temporary staffing needs.

It takes an average of four minutes for Wonolo to fill positions for seasonal staffing. A number of job seekers include college students, retirees, parents who work part-time, and workers who are supplementing their income with flexible jobs. Some of the companies that use Wonolo include Coca-Cola, Good Eggs, HSN, Papa Johns, Six Flags, and Uniqlo.